"By week three, I couldn't take it any more"

I was at a conference last week where I was giving a workshop on CEO transitions, and afterwards I stepped into another session already in progress which was a poverty similation. Participants role-play the lives of low-income families, from parents trying to care for their children to senior citizens trying to get by on Social Security. The task of each family is to provide food, shelter and other basic necessities during the simulation. To do so, they interact with various institutions - schools, clinics, social service providers, utility companies, child care providers, employers, banks, pawn shops and payday lenders, transportation systems - which are "staffed" by low-income volunteers from the community.

Each person and family has a profile outlining their situation, and the simulation takes place over four fictional weeks. The simulation has been used broadly around the US, and I have always heard it described as powerful, eye-opening, transforming. Participants learn how complicated everything becomes in a cash economy, the illogic of the social service systems, the mass transit system that can't get you from your babysitter to your job on time.

This was the first time I've seen it in person, and the quotes from the participants during the debriefing discussion bore that out. I paraphrase:

• "I pay my bills online, and it takes me 10 minutes. I had no concept that it can take a whole week just to pay a utility bill, because of the extra hoops and the need for cash and the lousy bus system. It was exhausting."
• "The first thing I did was go to the bank to open a bank account - and I was told I couldn't. I had no idea what to do next."
• (From a volunteer): "I thought it was so interesting that before we even opened up the first week of the simulation, we looked around the room and every single one of you had a calculator out. It was like, this is just a math challenge; if I work the numbers right I can make it all work."
• By the third week, half of the children were no longer attending school. Said one teenage "student:" "Learning the state flower of Missouri had absolutely no relevance to my life. Going to school was not a useful choice when my family had so many crises to deal with."
• "I was a drug dealer, and I felt like I actually had some options, both for myself and to help others. Crime seemed like a pretty good option."

And so I've been wondering - is it possible to design a similar simulation that would help people understand the situation of someone living in a poor, oppressed community in another country, and how it comes to be that violence "seems like a pretty good option?" Perhaps one of the Israeli-Palestinian collaborative organizations has developed such a thing. Because it seems to me that empathy goes a long way toward finding better solutions to problems, and there are reasons that most people decide that violence, or crime, are better options than just obediently going to school and doing what the system tells them to do. Maybe if we come to understand those reasons better, we'll be more inclined to help those people and less inclined to hate them, lock them up, or shoot them.

Anybody know of such a thing?